


Fin de Partie

by tyroneslothrop



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Allegorical, Eat a dick Orwell, Existentialism, Kinda, M/M, Mentions of Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-05
Updated: 2015-09-05
Packaged: 2018-04-19 05:30:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4734365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyroneslothrop/pseuds/tyroneslothrop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan struggles with existence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fin de Partie

He is a vagabond drifting on the pavement, the grit crashing around his feet. He doesn't remember why he left and he doesn't remember why he's returning. He sees a schoolgirl in front of him. Their glittery bag is the single splash of colour in this foamy abyss, twinkling in the dim sunlight. The crack of a car door sounds, creating discord with the hum of day. Dan passes her. She is a grown woman, and the bag has been thrown into the back seat. He walks on.

The sky is draped over horizon like waves licking at the shore. Everything is distant and empty, and Dan aches for nothing in particular. His heart is suspended above his stomach from his larynx, which was sweetly embracing the oesophagus, beating like they are trying to escape his ribs. He'd let them.

He has not found solace in video making for a while. It is empty. The culture is empty. His associates are empty. He is but a capitalist cash cow now. A dead horse crowded with floggers. He can almost see the sweat dripping off their craniums, red with focus and exertion. A panorama of fat cats, their familiar faces twisting into deformed, swollen business suits. So it goes. The wind begins to tremor and crash around him and the bitter cold of night sets around his exposed arms. He shivers. Puts his head down. Quickens his pace.

He sees the apartment embalmed in clouds. The lights are not on. Phil has fallen asleep without him.

The sun suddenly turns their shutters on. Good night.

-

It is a shock for him to wake up one day and find that Phil's charm is fading on him. Do not misinterpret, Phil is still one of the most wonderful things he has had the honour to meet. But. He has grown accustomed. Wake up, shower, get changed, brush teeth, be with Phil. His stomach slowly begins to churn.

He's lain there with faint smile exposed on his lips, his hair softly fanned over him. His nose is like a pebble upon a beach. A scrawl of perfectly composed lines and curves, and Dan thinks himself too good for him. Bile rises to his throat.

Rays are seeping in from their broken window and lapping around the humid air. Dan feels choked. Engulfed. He runs out, pyjamas and all, into the golden light. The bird's symphonies are clawing through the air, and Dan feels the notes rip through his skin. He gazes to the sky. Sweet surrender into the sunlight's arms! For the sun is a better lover than himself, and he tells them as much, and they cradle him in the soft glow of daylight. They dance like that till the birds beseech them stop.

When he returns, Phil has risen and he beams to him from the doorway. “What were you doing?”

“Watering our chrysanthemums!” Dan blurts. Phil's eyes respond, convinced.

They meddle about in the springtime air, cleaning, cooking, often intercepted by Dan gazing forlornly at the trees. Phil notices his wistfulness maybe, as he slides next to him, mouth pressed gently to his ear.

“Do you want to make love?” he says, and the look in his eyes makes Dan's stomach flip in a not all pleasant way. What a divine proclamation! What joy, what beauty! They are on the couch now. His legs are spread, Phil is inside him, his face sheathed in his neck, and Dan is staring wistfully out the window.

-

There's a melancholic feel to hearing the sounds of shouting and slapping. It no longer hurts, it's almost a comfort. The faint blur of their piggish pink faces growling and twisting becomes homely. They seem to ascend and swirl above the decor like two bloody lungs. Suspended by God himself. Ribs begin to collide in the air against the opposing muscle. Strange thing to see, two parts of the same body fighting each other. Dan remains passive.

"You fucking whore!" seems to be the theme for tonight. Dan's seen this one before. At the third ring of this phrase, the sun beats down from the window and onto their figures, swirling the colours of their grotesque faces like a paint pot. They're now a garish orange glow, and they illuminate everything around them. Like cartoon characters. Dan begins to chew on cold potatoes from his father's dinner. No-one objects. Or even notices. Everyone present is preoccupied. Life is good.

-

They get a divorce 2 weeks later. He finds out through Facebook.

-

Friedrich Nietzsche once said, "The demand to be loved is the greatest kind of arrogance.". This begs the question, does Dan demand to be loved or does he simply wish it? He already is, by his spouse and by millions behind their computers, but it is not enough some days. He rips the grass from the confines of the ground. Damn this blasted tomb he calls his body! He is wealthy, but emotionally, Dan is so poor he cannot afford to die.

There's a burning ember of coal in the sky and it seems to gently place their lips on the crown of Dan's head. Dan accepts, forces his neck forward, parts the bottom of his hair, lets them lap at his sweet spot. He hasn't let Phil there for a while. He can see the ocean from the corner of his eye, a sketchy outline on the sky, like the artist slipped on the canvas. He chokes a bit on his tonsils.

His thought processes now confine themselves to 140 characters. This doesn't affect him much. If the entirety of the internet collapsed tomorrow and the only thing recovered was his Twitter feed, you could probably recreate a timeline of internet culture from 2009 to now. No pride follows that statement.

One of the clouds is shaped like the curve of Phillip's nose. 

If I had a flower for every time I thought of you, I'd have suffocated by now.

-

There's a star in the clouds that looks like a blot of amber on a crumpled page. Sapphire bleeds behind it, trying to drown them out. The artist has been careless today. The watercolours drip into each other without thought, like trails of tears on the wayward sky. Maybe the saints crying themselves.

Phil is a dollop of cream on his jade background. He has his back to the Earth and his face to the sun. He doesn't notice Dan's gaze. The wedding ring clawing at his fingers is like a star twinkling in the naked night, and Dan wishes on it almost. The sky is still hung above them, a passive visitor. Phil's eyelids flutter and raise themselves to Dan, grinning somehow, and the muscle in his chest aches for how beautiful he is.

-

He sees his grandmother that night. Cradled by the warmth of his bed. Curled up like children, yin and yang, just like when he was a child. But she is cold and she is blue. And no matter how hard he tries, he cannot speak. His hand slips through her, but she is there and alert and he looks into her eyes and she looks back and for a brief moment he feels flesh on flesh.

Then he sits up.

“Y'alright?” a voice quakes next to him. He. Reaches out, touches him. Hot, thrumming skin. Their face is not adorn with wrinkles, neither are they on the threshold of death, flirting with the Grim Reaper himself. For it is Phil, and Phil it has always been. He bridges the ocean between their lips in response.

They make love, and the moon sneers from above them. Phil places his hand on Dan's chest and his heart lunges towards it, trying to tear out of his skin. His entire body is lurching. He hits his prostate and Dan screams to the ceiling, seeing through the flaky plaster and straight to the eyes of God, the headboard banging sounding his funeral fanfare.

-

Trust Dan to be struck with the cold in the middle of the summer. His throat is too rough for it to be an allergy. Every expulsion of breath hurts. It's almost like the first time he met Phil. His body is lain naked on his soaked blankets, fever consuming his entire body. Everything felt like fire. It was almost picturesque, Phil thought, the light from the sun waltzing over his boyish chest, red marmalade and gold.

Phil feeds him soup, bathes him, throws pills down his throat. The sweet glimmer of trust that beckons him whenever he sees him makes him want to kneel and weep.

"I'd rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other man", he croaks.

Dan is so sleepy.

-

One night he watches a shooting star plummet from the sky and into the horizon. He doesn't make a wish.

-

The discordant mosaic of street performers that litters the London streets has been wiped clean, the only physical thing on this new slate being Dan. All the windows are shut. The sun has been turned off. Along with the moon. And the street lights. The sky a dull translucent grey. Dan tramples along this musky abyss silently until like a pencil in the sky, figures begin to present themselves within his visual threshold.

Grey blobs became ubiquitous around himself. Shaping themselves now. Slowly being moulded by some higher being. Becoming familiar. People he's seen before. Soon his grandmother is next to him, resplendent in her trademark floral dress. She is holding our a bowl. Sweet orange and toxic yellow confronts his gaze. For his grandmother was not the best cook, but she knew how to use a microwave, which was good enough for Dan. He gratuitously accepts the tinned spaghetti.

Further on, he notices these sketches are drifting from his past into his frontal memory lobe. An ice cream truck softly passing by him, a balloon long let go above him, a set of swings on the horizon. His teddy bears have became sentient, walking beside him, Stuffy and Cuddles in full swinging animation in front of him. He tries to keep up, the ice cream jingle cheering him on.

The sky is now a distant crimson. Day rise, he presumes. His father is above him. He's wearing a green hat today.

 

-

The morning after Dan dies, he arises from his bed sheets cloaked in warmth. He gazes up to the sky from the window, transfixed. The sky is different somehow. More vibrant. Thrumming in the mist of day. He opens the window. Breathes it in. Chokes a bit. The air reeks of ash trees and the pollen of white lilies. The air is humid. Cyan is beating into his irises. He doesn't mind. He leaves the apartment, boxers and all, to water the plants. His chrysanthemums are wilting, he notes sadly.

He feels himself become more solid somehow, his bare feet digging further into the ground, becoming one with the tree roots. He is Earth, he is what the rest of the world must fight against, the source of eternal struggle.

He feels the pretense of a storm on the hairs of his arms. Shrugging it off, he begins to water and tidy to his heart's content. The entire town is dead. Not a soul floating above the pavement. 

Soon, without noticing at first, he's being carried up, up into the sky by something invisible. Something rough and calloused, vine-like underneath his fingers. It takes him a few moments to realize it's a palm that's spread underneath him. Maybe this is it. Their fingers swoon underneath his thin thighs. He ascends into the sky, beautiful, pristine. To look into their eyes. See, for once.

Think you're escaping and run into yourself.

It is Phil.

-

Salt licks his bare feet. The sunlight lays upon him and caresses his skin like they were distant lovers. Sand is caught in his hair like rheum. It is soft under his fingertips, like a teddy bears fur. He pets it for a while. They and the sea lay together, contemplating.

“God, they'll refer to me as danisnotonfire in the obituaries,” he thinks.


End file.
